Colin Gorrie

The invention that ruined English writing Because it came 25 years too early

You can read the full story of this ill-timed technological innovation here:

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-invent...

“Bite" sounded like "beet." "Beet" sounded like "bate,” and “bate” sounded like a lengthened version of “bat.”

The printing press froze the spelling as it was before this game of musical chairs began. If it had arrived just a generation later, English spelling would look completely different.

If you've ever studied Spanish, you know that their vowel letters are pronounced consistently: A is ‘ah,’ E is ‘eh,’ I is ‘ee,’ O is ‘oh,’ and U is ‘oo.’

English vowels used to work the same way.

When printing arrived in England in 1476, it started to standardize spelling.

The timing could not have been worse: English was in the middle of a massive upheaval called the Great Vowel Shift, in which many vowels in the language changed.

The spelling froze, while the pronunciation kept moving.

This week I wrote about how the printing press triggered a panic over Latin loanwords in the 16th century.

But the printing press did something else to English: it caused much of the chaos that haunts English spelling to this day.

All because it arrived just a little too early.

Leave the em-dash alone This writing panic has a 500-year precedent

Most great English sentences draw on both Germanic and Romance/Latin layers of the language. If you start pulling at the Latin threads, the whole thing comes apart.

Here's the full story of what the purists were fighting about, and why it echoes today:

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/em-dash-ai...

(I don't mind "mooned", for instance.)

The cause of this panic was ultimately technological change: the printing press had made it easy to flood English with Latin vocabulary.

But in the end, the purists lost. And English is probably richer for it.

"It is a truth everywhere acknowledged, that a onefold man in ownership of good wealth must be in want of a wife."

These 16th-century purists coined words like "mooned" for "lunatic," "fleshstrings" for "muscles," and "endsay" for "conclusion."

Some of these coinages were better than others.

"Question", after all, comes from Latin quaestio.

"Outrageous fortune"? No. Both French words. They'd be banned.

Hamlet would have raged against "unmeetly weird" instead (from Old English "unġemetlīċ" and "wyrd").

Jane Austen's most famous line would have been much altered as well...

Almost 500 years ago, a group of English writers decided Latin and French loanwords were corrupting the language. They wanted to replace them all with "pure English" alternatives.

If they'd won, Hamlet would have wondered "To be or not to be, that is the asking."

Dead Language Society | Colin Gorrie | Substack English is weirder than you think. A weekly dive into the hidden history of everyday words. Click to read Dead Language Society, by Colin Gorrie, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subsc...

You can read it over at the Dead Language Society, where every em-dash is lovingly placed by human hands.

www.deadlanguagesociety.com

Leave the em-dash alone.

Are you editing em-dashes out of your prose? Leaving “artisanal” typos in your articles as proof of humanity?

No one wants their writing mistaken for “AI slop.”

But in avoiding that charge, we risk surrendering some of the best tools in the literary tradition.

Full story out tomorrow.

Why the worst idea in linguistics won’t die The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong

Why the worst idea in linguistics won’t die: Why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong (mostly)

open.substack.com/pub/colingor...

I did not know that... truly bizarre. Thank you!

And the purists couldn’t even follow their own rules: Cheke alone used dozens of Latin loanwords in his own writing.

One of the few words championed by purists that's still in common use is “naysay,” probably because it was already used in Scotland before the purists ever got to it.

“Negation” was first attested before 1425, “logic” had been used by English writers since 1362, and “resurrection” since about 1300. “Prophet” was first used before the Norman Conquest!

The purists were pulling up roots, rather than pruning new growth...

One purist, Sir John Cheke, proposed “gainrising” for resurrection and “foresayer” for “prophet.” His colleague Ralph Lever gave us “witcraft” for logic and “naysay” for negation.

But these Latin-derived words had been used in English for generations.

In the 1550s, a group of purists decided Latin loanwords were corrupting the English language. Their solution was to coin “pure English” replacements.

Some of their proposals were pretty weird.

Could Beowulf see blue? The history of English colour words

The whole system seems to have been built around brightness rather than hue.

So how did the modern system evolve? How did English go from six basic colours to the eleven we have today?

I wrote up the full story here: www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/history-en...

Old English colour words are genuinely strange.

First, there were only six basic colour terms, and they each covered a lot of the colour space.

The word brūn, the ancestor of "brown," could mean brown, purple, dark red, or the gleam of a polished sword.

And "blue" was barely in the picture.

This week, I wrote about how Greek and Russian speakers process blue differently than English speakers do, because their languages carve it into two colours.

But English has its own version of this story.

Why the worst idea in linguistics won’t die The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong

Speaking of good stories, if you'd like to read the full account of the long debate how language affects thought, it's up today on my newsletter:

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/sapir-whor...

The weak version, where the language you speak gives a slight processing advantage in lab conditions, doesn't make for great fiction.

And nothing travels faster than a good story!

And yet it’s the strong version that has lived on in the public mind.

So why won't that version die?

In part, because it's irresistible to storytellers. From Orwell's Newspeak to the alien language of Arrival, the strong version offers a world where language is magic.

As a result of research like Malotki’s, the strong version has disappeared from within the walls of linguistics departments.

But alongside this, study after study has confirmed that the weak version is basically right in limited circumstances: language does nudge thought at the margins.

In 1983, the linguist Ekkehart Malokti published a 700-page rebuttal.

The epigraph of his book was a single Hopi sentence, translated as: “Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then he woke up the girl again.”

Touché!

The strong version was built on Benjamin Lee Whorf’s claim that the Hopi language had “no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time’.”

Whorf believed that this led to an entirely different way of perceiving the world.

But if you give Russian speakers a verbal task that occupies the language centres of the brain while they’re distinguishing colours, the advantage vanishes completely.

This is evidence that the (slight) Russian superpower comes from language.

The weak version has real evidence behind it. The strong version does not.

Here’s what the weak version looks like in practice. Russian has two basic words for blue: siniy (dark) and goluboy (light).

Russian speakers distinguish shades across that boundary faster than English speakers do.

There are two versions of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the strong version says language constrains what you can think.

The weak version says language affects what you think.

For example, it might make you slightly faster at distinguishing colours, or bias how you remember spatial arrangements.